Your most dreadful writerly sin

(N.B.: I've asked the mods to move this to the AW Roundtable.)

Not to be confused with the thead "Funny literary mistakes". Nor are we looking for silly little venial sins like gift-wrapping a manuscript or phoning an agent like clockwork each week simply to see how s/he's doing or enclosing a vial of your own blood with your vampire novel. No, no, none of that. What we want are mortal sins in their full magnificence--sins you paid for dearly, perhaps, but sins of which you now can say: "The price was high but worth it, 'cause I'm a better writer now."

That said, I'll begin with a sin of mine that is flat-out notorious. It is the stuff of legends. Even now, years later, when agents go to summer camp to roast hot dogs and swap horror stories, they still recall the Rebster's sin. This is scary stuff. Be warned.

After my fourth book, when I'd just begun to start over, I took a wrong turn. I ended up in Hell Town, where I grew--somehow--convinced that, as an award-winning author who had been optioned for film...and as a former journalist who'd had a nationally syndicated column...I say, I grew convinced somehow because of these and other things that I no longer needed to proofread as intensely as anyone else. Don't get me wrong, I proofread. But I no longer went through each page 50 times--frontwards, backwards, upside down, etc.

The time came to send out the first pages of, I thought, my breakthrough book. A hardboiled mystery that would turn the genre on its head. I was surprised by the form rejections. But then I started getting a handful of personal notes: 'Hysterically funny! But not quite for us.' and "Dementedly delightful, but..." Etc. WTF, I wondered. Then came, like a thunderbolt, one agent's revelation: she'd drawn a jeering Happy Face beside one word she'd underlined. On the first page of my masterpiece--oh, God, the shame and horror!--my failure to proof had resulted in...this:

'Her red dress had a wide, plunging neckline. And I stared in delight at her beautiful beasts.'


All right, it's your turn. Confession is good for the soul.

Well, we're getting some interesting sins here. And I thank y'all for contributing. You're a lively, interesting gang. I'm still hoping that we can open this up to sins aside from proofing. After all, no one is likely to ever the top the old Japanese sign announcing 'We pray for MacArthur's erection!'

Any terrible errors of judgment? Embarrassing sins of behavior? I've got a doozie involving--but nooooo. I don't want to hog the stage.

Well, all right, then. One sin more. Then I'll have to pull back for a while for fear of frightening the lot of you off:

Writers are sooooo vulnerable at the very start. I had an agent who believed in me and who managed to land a two-book hardback contract with a reputable publisher. Like any other writer who'd been ignored for too long, I became confused about the nature of the business. Though I tried my darndest not to overdo my contact with my agent, I jumped at the chance to become Best Friends with my editor...who occasionally made disparaging remarks about my agent not living in Gotham. Around the time of my second book, when I too was having some trouble accessing my agent and I was feeling some concern about the next book contract...the editor, my Best Friend, put the matter in the strongest terms: I really needed a new agent, one who was available for lunch and could be reached. I could waste a lot of time putting the best face on this, but the fact of the matter is clear to me now: though I left one final message for my agent, that wasn't enough. I should have written her the loveliest letter on earth to thank her for all she'd done and to see if we arrange for a lunch to talk about anything she might have on her mind, to fine-tune our relationship wherever she felt tuning was required. Instead, I changed agents, too quickly--scarcely considering whom I wanted to work with in the panic I now felt. I ended up with an agent who made me some quick pocket change...by moving me to another house where she had better contacts. And so it was that I went from hardback to paperback originals.

My first agent wasn't entirely blameless. She had been unresponsive for months. But I didn't try hard enough to save a good relationship. And I didn't understand that, by the very nature of the business we're engaged in, editors can be our allies but never our Best Friends.

TheTinCat said:

Well.... *cough* ... Going through a bad period in my life I was having a hard time figuring out what to do with the last half of my plot in a manuscript and I very cleverly decided that I would just borrow some elements from the last half of a Stephen King book and just kind of toss it together.

After all, wasn't I a good enough writer to pull off an ending that seemingly had nothing to do with the first half of my book? And if the ending worked for King, it would work for me, right?

Needless to say, my editor completely tore it apart, and I spent the better part of a year crying, downing antidepressants and rewriting the last half of the book completely.

Turned out great, though! And you'd never know the old ending was ever there.

Click to expand...

I'm glad it worked out for you. There's a lesson we all learn at some point or other, about the temptation to borrow. And you feel better for confessing, right? I like to think that somewhere there's a thread just like this one for editors and publishers...one that would enable the culprit responsible for not listing my first novel in their season's catalog. Try to imagine how it feels to go out, all aflutter, looking for your new baby on the shelves and finding it nowhere. Then, finally, you learn--confess, you rascal, whoever you are, you slimed by first baby!

There's a really cool story about what I did to save my baby's life...but I'll save that for another day and another thread.